Picture: Sweet Potato Ya | Written by: Ruixue | Editor in charge: Kexin
Hello everyone and welcome to this issue of 11lab.
In the past few years after the epidemic began, we seem to have felt more and deeper negative emotions: stress, anxiety, fear, depression… Because of this, many people began to actively try emotional self-help, Mindfulness and meditation are the new fads.
Mindfulness is a kind of mental exercise method, and it is also a scientific tool generally recommended by the academic and medical circles and has a significant effect on improving mood. It advocates an act of consciously focusing on the present moment without evaluating judgments.
Meditation is a broader concept and refers to the use of a technique, or concentration on a specific object, thought, or activity, to Train attention and awareness to achieve a state of mental clarity, emotional calm and stability.
Mindfulness is one of the techniques that meditation utilizes, and mindfulness is not only a meditation practice, but a way of life. They can reduce negative emotions in people, but they can do much more than that.
The following series of studies will shed light on the lesser-known side of mindfulness meditation:
Mindfulness can make you and your colleagues more harmonious
Mindfulness may help you relieve pain
Meditation linked to lower cardiovascular risk
Meditation can help you reduce mistakes
It’s not all good to get rid of negativity
Mindfulness can make you and your colleagues more harmonious
Everyone’s impression of mindfulness may be that a person comes home after get off work, takes a bath, burns incense and meditates cross-legged, and needs a suitable time and place, but in fact, mindfulness practice can happen anytime, anywhere, and some people are at work. They also practice mindfulness, and researchers have found that doing so is not only beneficial to themselves, but can also affect relationships and improve the work environment.
The study, published in Organization Science, conducted dozens of in-depth interviews with people who practice mindfulness and apply the principles of mindfulness at work.
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Mindfulness consists of 7 main principles:
1. Beginner’s heart: keep curiosity and treat every contact as the first time;
2. Acceptance: Accepting one’s own thoughts and environment as they are;
3. Non-judgment: observe with an objective and impartial attitude, do not rush to make judgments;
4. Self-compassion: Accept and cherish yourself, don’t hurt yourself;
5. Equality: Face all experiences of body and mind in a welcoming and gentle way;
6. Do not force: Do not suppress your thoughts, do not set the goal of mindfulness, many things are beyond our control alone;
7. Go with the flow: accept things as they are, change and develop.
Mindfulness leads to focus and peace, and respondents mentioned that colleagues notice and are affected by changes in them, The exchanges between the two parties will become more harmonious. High-quality interpersonal relationships in turn have positive effects on team work, such as increasing team trust.
It can be seen that Doing mindfulness can not only bring peace to oneself, but can also be transformed into positive interactions, resulting in a more harmonious and healthy organization.
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Mindfulness may help you relieve pain
Research published in July in the journal Pain (PAIN) found an interesting conclusion that mindfulness practice may reduce your pain.
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The researchers concluded: “For many who struggle with chronic pain, it is not the pain itself that affects their quality of life, but the mental distress that goes with it.”
p>In other words, the pain that really haunts people is people’s associations and judgments about physical pain.
Mindfulness allows one to forgo evaluation and just feel it, instead of evaluating it with one’s own experience and self-awareness.
40 participants experienced a series of thermal stimuli to assess their pain level. They were then divided into two groups, one group completed four 20-minute mindfulness sessions, while the other group listened to an audiobook during this time.
The researchers then let them experience thermal stimulation again, and let the people who received mindfulness training also turn on the mindfulness mode during the process, while the others closed their eyes and rested.
Mindful participants reported a 32% reduction in pain intensity and a 33% reduction in unpleasantness from pain. strong>.
Researchers scanned the participants’ brains and found that mindfulness disrupted communication between brain regions associated with pain and those that produce feelings of self. Simply put, physical pain still occurs, but it translates to sensations less often.
This may help many people who suffer from chronic pain. If they can practice mindfulness and learn to only feel pain without causing further worries and fears, it may be a lot easier .
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Meditation is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease
In 2017, the American Heart Association stated that meditation may help maintain healthy blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and overall cardiovascular health.
A 2020 study in the American Journal of Cardiology looked at more than 61,000 samples, supporting this finding.
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All samples have nearly 6,000 people with meditation training, accounting for nearly 10%. Compared with people who never meditated, they had lower odds of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke and coronary artery disease.
The researchers also controlled for other factors associated with cardiovascular disease, such as age, gender, smoking habits, and body mass index, but meditation still had the most significant effect.
Meditation can indeed be calming, stress-relieving, and support our emotional health. And we all know that bad mood can lead to many diseases, such as gastrointestinal problems, breast hyperplasia, breast nodules, endocrine disorders, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, malignant tumors and so on.
In this sense, meditation is indeed a Simple, economical, low-risk “treatment” (Attention! Mindfulness and meditation cannot replace medical treatment, and physical illness still needs to seek medical treatment in time and follow the doctor’s advice).
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Meditation can help you reduce mistakes
Open Monitoring Meditation is a type of meditation that draws attention to what is going on in the mind and body. A study published in Brain Science found that Open Monitoring Meditation can help us better identify mistakes.
▲Image source: Reference [4]
The research team recruited more than 200 participants to monitor their brain activity with electroencephalography (EEG). Some participants did a 20-minute open-monitored meditation practice and then completed a distraction test.
Ta’s brain activity was accurately recorded on the EEG, and the researchers found that about half a second after the wrong stimulus appeared, there would be a specific neural signal indicating that the person recognized the error , while the meditators had stronger signal strength compared to the control group.
While meditators did not immediately act on errors, they were more aware of the existence of errors than others, which in itself can be helpful for correcting errors. Action provides potential.
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It’s not all good to get rid of negativity
Mindfulness and meditation are best known for their ability to reduce negative emotions such as anxiety, stress, depression, etc., and make people calm and calm. For the most part, that’s a good thing, after all, who wants to be caught up in a never-ending vortex of emotions?
However, on the other hand, negative emotions are sometimes not that bad. Like positive emotions, they’re a signal that reminds us where the problem is.
Like the burning pain of a finger running over a fire, this pain keeps us from doing the same thing again. Feelings of fear can keep us away from something dangerous; feelings of anger let us know that we are being attacked and frustrated, or that our boundaries are being violated; compensatory behavior, which may be able to save a relationship.
In short, negative emotions are also integral to our survival, self-knowledge, and relationships.
So, what happens to us when mindfulness meditation removes some of these beneficial negative emotions? Researchers from the University of Washington conducted eight experiments with more than 1,400 participants.
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First study confirms Mindfulness meditation does reduce guilt. Participants were first asked to write down something that made them feel guilty. Then some of them listened to an 8-minute recording of mindfulness meditation. Others listened to an unrelated recording. It was found that those who listened to the mindfulness recording later reported moreless guilt.
The team then tested whether mindfulness meditation affects guilt-driven behavior. Participants were asked to recall and write about a time when they had wronged someone and felt guilty, and were then randomly assigned to meditate or not. The team asked participants to imagine that they now have $100 to buy gifts for those they have wronged, and to donate to flood victims in Africa. It was found that people who meditated were allocated approximately 17% less money to those hurt by them than those who did not meditate.
Successful mindfulness meditationreduces feelings of guilt, guilt, which may lead them to refrain from taking actions that help restore relationships .
Researchers say: “A short period of meditation is a tool that can make you feel better, just like taking aspirin for a headache. As researchers, we have a responsibility to not only share the benefits of meditation Positive effects, but also share its unintended side effects, such as the occasional possibility of loosening one’s moral compass.”
We can learn to use mindfulness and meditation to help us get rid of unnecessary negative emotions, control our irrational behavior, and become more peaceful. But perhaps more important is not just eliminating negative emotions, but transforming them into behavioral and interpersonal patterns to solve real problems. Sometimes you don’t have to be too afraid of negative emotions, it’s better to try to interpret the signals it releases~
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Alright, that concludes the research on mindfulness meditation in this issue.
Do you usually do mindfulness meditation? What does mindfulness meditation bring you? Do you have any questions about mindfulness meditation? Come and chat in the comments area!
Of course, if you have any new knowledge and research you want to know or are interested in, please let us know in the comment area.
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I love the world.
References
[1] Christopher S. Reina, Glen E. Kreiner, Alexandra Rheinhardt, Christine A. Mihelcic. Your Presence Is Requested: Mindfulness Infusion in Workplace Interactions and Relationships. Organization Science, 2022; DOI : 10.1287/orsc.2022.1596
[2] Gabriel Riegner, Grace Posey, Valeria Oliva, Youngkyoo Jung, William Mobley, Fadel Zeidan. Disentangling self from pain: mindfulness meditation-induced pain relief is driven by thalamic-default mode network decoupling. Pain, 2022; Publish Ahead of Print DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002731
[3] Chayakrit Krittanawong, Anirudh Kumar, Zhen Wang, Bharat Narasimhan, Hani Jneid, Salim S. Virani, Glenn N Levine. Meditation and Cardiovascular Health in the US. The American Journal of Cardiology , 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.amjcard.2020.06.043
[4] Lin, Eckerle, Peng, Moser. On Variation in Mindfulness Training: A Multimodal Study of Brief Open Monitoring Meditation on Error Monitoring. Brain Sciences, 2019; 9 (9): 226 DOI: 10.3390/brainsci9090226
[5] Andrew C. Hafenbrack, Matthew L. LaPalme, Isabelle Solal. Mindfulness meditation reduces guilt and prosocial reparation.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021; DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000298< /p>